Helena – Page 68 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Big days ahead for the Middle East…

Tomorrow, Pres. Obama will give his much-awaited address “to the Muslim world” in Cairo. On Sunday, Lebanon holds parliamentary elections– and Iran holds its elections June 12.
I’m in Damascus this week. Officials and non-officials here are very eager for improved relations with the US, and express some concern that despite all his rhetoric of “change”, Obama has so far done precious little to implement that promise.
The WaPo’s Glenn Kessler reported this morning that Sec. of State Clinton spoke with her Syrian counterpart by phone Sunday, and made plans for both Israeli-Arab peace envoy George Mitchell and a US military team to visit Syria later this month.
The military delegation will be discussing coordination in combatting insurgent forces in Iraq. That is something the Syrian government has an interest in. But it has an even stronger interest in not having this be the only level at which relations improve. Having a political delegation visit is seen as even more important here…
However, Obama still has not returned to Damascus the ambassador who was peevishly withdrawn by Bush some years ago. (A high-ranking official in the Bush White House recently told me that the US was in a state of “quasi-war” with Syria in those years. What the heck does that term mean? A state of war is a clear category in international relations, that imposes certain responsibilities on both sides. And often, indeed, even in a state of war, the sides still have ambassadorial-level representation in each other’s capitals… But ‘quasi-war’???)
Obama has also done, or failed to do, a number of other things that could have started to improve relations with Syria.
One of my concerns is that unless he and his people (including Mitchell) pay serious and sustained attention to any issue– including Syria, but including other key issues in the region, too– then the bureaucrats in the State Department will just continue on the same kind of auto-pilot course they became habituated to adopting throughout eight years of GWB– and prior to that, eight years of the also strongly pro-Israel Pres. Clinton.
Remember that throughout those 16 years, any State Department employees who– like Ann Wright and a few brave others– strongly disagreed on grounds of principle with the course US policy was taking in the region resigned their posts. And those not courageous enough to resign who still dared to raise different views within the department rapidly found their careers sidelined.
Turning that great ship of the State Department’s bureaucracy around until it is seamlessly and effectively following the lead of the country’s recently elected new “Captain” will take some sustained attention and energy.
(Another question: Is Hillary Clinton the right person to actually do this inside the department that she heads?)
Anyway, what I’ve been hearing for many weeks now, in Washington DC and elsewhere, is that Washington has been waiting to adopt some kind of a new, more inclusive policy toward Syria after the Lebanese elections.
Okay, that’s next week.
George Mitchell will be in the region next week– he already has plans to visit Israel and Ramallah then.
It would make excellent sense if he also visits Damascus then, for the first time in his role as peace envoy.
He needs to hear the views and concerns of the government here, which has a lot to contribute to the peacemaking venture– especially if, as I strongly hope, Obama and Mitchell are aiming at securing a serious, sustainable, and comprehensive agreement that will end all outstanding portions of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
My judgment is that there is now very little likelihood at all that a viable peace agreement can be concluded only on the Palestinian track– which is all that Obama and Co. have talked about, as of yet.
We need to hear him say out loud that a “comprehensive” Arab-Israeli peace is in the US national interest– not just a “Palestinian-Israeli” peace.
… Anyway, I don’t have time to write much here. But regarding the prospects around the Lebanese elections, the best commentary so far is still this piece by the astute Lebanese blogger Qifa Nabki.

On settlements

I’ve just been catching up with Helene Cooper’s piece in the NYT yesterday on Obama and the Israeli settlement freeze.
She concludes:

When asked on Thursday what he would do if Mr. Netanyahu continued to balk at a settlement freeze, Mr. Obama said he was not yet ready to offer an “or else.”

My view, for what it’s worth, is that the president should keep up the strongly worded requests that Israel cease its ongoing settlement-building activity but should focus primarily on winning the final Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement, under the terms of which the final status of all settlements will be determined.
The (hopefully successful!) demand for a settlement freeze should be seen as a helpful entry-point into these negotiations rather than an end in itself.
If, as some unconfirmed reports have said, Obama wants to achieve the final peace agreement within two years, that’s what he needs to focus on.

Obama-Mitchell peace mission gains a little momentum

Haaretz’s Barak Ravid had more details yesterday of the meeting an official Israeli delegation held in London last Tuesday with Obama’s special Mideast peace envoy Sen. George Mitchell and his team.
He quoted one senior Israeli official as saying after the meeting,

“We’re disappointed… All of the understandings reached during the [George W.] Bush administration are worth nothing.”

He adds these details:

There’s a lot to comment on there!
Firstly, why should Pres. Obama be at all worried by the prospect that too “tough” a US line might “lead to the dissolution of the Netanyahu government”??
Secondly, why should any Israelis imagine that a possible ruling of their own judiciary should be expected by anyone else to over-ride the clear requirements of international diplomacy and international law regarding the– actually quite illegal– project of planting Jewish-Israeli settlers in occupied land?
Then, toward the end of the piece, Ravid writes this,

Defense Minister Ehud Barak will travel to Washington on Sunday [yesterday– or next week? not clear] in an attempt to put further pressure on the Obama administration.

So Arad, Molcho, and Co. were unsuccessful in snowing G. Mitchell with their arguments– and now, Netanyahu sends Ehud Barak to Washington… to speak with whom?
This does look just the teeniest bit like Netanyahu and E. Barak trying to go behind Mitchell’s back and speak with other heavyweights in washington… Perhaps E Barak also hopes to speak with the president himself?
If it is an attempt to go behind Mitchell’s back, I am pretty certain it will backfire.
Sen. Mitchell had experience of that, after all, during his first go-round with dealing with the Palestine Question, back in 2001. Also, let’s just recall that he is by no means a political lightweight in Washington…
(Small authorial note. I’m in Damascus, having traveled here overland from Capadoccia over the past 48 hours. The combination of travel and being in Syria means I haven’t been as well plugged-in or as timely as usual on these stories. However, I’ve been gathering LOTS of great new material which will appear here and elsewhere over the weeks ahead. ~HC)

Olmert (and Ross?) and a new concept of the Jewish state

Ariel Beery had a very interesting piece in Haaretz yesterday. It describes a new movement among Israelis– and key friends of Israel like Dennis Ross— to fashion a new concept of a state.
Instead of this state being a nation-state, that is, a project that includes all those who live inside its borders, this new kind of state would be what Beery calls

a node-state – that is, … the sovereign element chosen by narrative and collective will at the center of a global network.

Immediately before he introduces that concept he notes this:

it had no desire to integrate other, non-Jewish groups among its citizenry into the Jewish nation

Beery indicates that when Ehud Olmert was still prime minister, he strongly supported this reconceptualizing of Israel:

Ehud Olmert set out to transform the conceptual and practical relationship between the state and the Jewish Diaspora. He began doing so last summer, when, in a speech before the Jewish Agency’s board of governors, he said that, “We must stop talking in terms of big brother and little brother, and instead speak in terms of two brothers marching hand in hand and supporting each other.”

For me, as a US citizen, an even more important part of what Beery writes comes next. He tells us that,

Jewish People Policy Planning Institute

The JPPPI is, of course, the institute that was headed until just a few weeks ago by Dennis Ross, now Sec. of Sate Clinton “special adviser” on the affairs of a swathe of countries, including Israel’s current big nemesis, Iran.
We already knew the JPPPI had a close connection with some international Zionist organizations like the Jewish National Fund. But now we learn that Ross also received a direct “tasking” from the Israeli prime minister to engage in a far-reaching reconceiving of the nature of the Israeli state and its relationship with world Jewry??
How can anyone in the Obama administration think that this man has the objectivity to have any say at all– even if only as an “adviser”– in the fashioning of our country’s Middle East policy?
As another footnote we should, of course, zero in on the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the “herrenvolk” concept that lies at the heart of the transformation of the idea of Israel from being a nation-state to being a “node-state.”
Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, and their friends and allies among the country’s Jewish citizenry, all call unequivocally for the definition of Israel to be the state of all its citizens, with no privileging of one group of citizens over others based solely on grounds of religion or ethnicity.
The idea that Dennis Ross, a Jewish person who has stable (and very influential) citizenship in a prosperous western democracy, should have more say in defining what the nature of the Israeli state should be than, say, a Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member or even just an regular–and fully tax-paying– Palestinian citizen of Israel truly boggles the mind.

Gvirtz: Prioritizing Peace over Settlements

I am pleased to be able to publish this important essay from Amos Gvirtz, a longtime member of Kibbutz Shefayim, in Israel. JWN readers may recall the interview I published with him back in March.
Gvirtz is a pillar of the Israeli nonviolence movement, and was a founder of Palestinians and Israelis for Nonviolence. He was the founding chairperson of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, and every week since summer 2006 he has published a short essay under the title “Don’t Say We Did Not Know.” You can find some older samples of these essays here, along with the email through which to subscribe to them. ~HC

Prioritizing Peace over Settlements
By Amos Gvirtz
A short while after his victory in the 1977 elections and his appointment as prime minister, Menahem Begin announced: “There will be many more Elon Morehs [an early ideological West Bank settlement].” And he went on to say, “So that a left-wing government will not be able to return the territories.”
In order to give weight to this announcement, the Begin government declared the settlements to be areas of national priority. This meant that the government viewed the construction and development of settlements in the occupied territories as a supreme Israeli interest. And in fact, since then and until today the settlers receive extensive benefits, far beyond what is allocated to any other population in Israel. This is also true for industrialists and business people who build their factories and businesses in the occupied territories.
Since the Begin government, no Israeli government has changed this priority, including the Rabin government, which while it froze settlement construction, paved bypass roads for the settlers, with all their ramifications.
Thus even during the seven years of the Oslo process, no Israeli government changed the policy which viewed the establishment and development of settlements as a supreme Israeli interest! We witnessed a political process, which seemed to most of us to be a peace process, at a time when the occupation actually continued to deepen! And in fact, during the time of the Oslo process, the number of settlers increased from 110,000 to 204,000; Israel demolished more than 1,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories; implemented two expulsions; and confiscated some 40,000 acres of Palestinian land. From the Palestinian point of view, these are unilateral acts of war by an occupying power against a defenseless civilian population.
After the 1999 elections, Prime Minister Ehud Barak added fuel to the fire when he appointed Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party as Minister of Housing in his government. The results were not long in coming: construction in the settlements reached new heights. The Meretz Party, which also sat in Barak’s government, fought against the corruption of the Sephardic religious party Shas (thereby deepening the rift with the Sephardic population in Israel), but failed in its role as guardian of the peace process. This failure marked one of the biggest mistakes of the Israeli Left, which occupied itself with political issues, while the Right created facts on the ground, with the goal of making the settlement process irreversible.
Israeli governments have developed a fixed pattern of behavior: they “agree” to American and European demands on the peace process, and at the same time deepen the occupation. We saw how the Olmert government did this during the Anapolis process.
Given all this, I have reached the conclusion that today the central demand of the Israeli Left must be, first and foremost, the cancellation of the priority status of the settlements in the occupied territories; the total cessation of funding for the settlements and the illegal outposts; upholding the law against settlers who expel Palestinian farmers from their lands and then take them over; the cessation of all land theft; a total cessation of house demolitions; a total cessation of the expulsion of Palestinians from the areas of the Southern Hebron Hills, the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim; the encouragement of settlers to return to Israel; and of course an end to the theft of West Bank and Golan Hight water. Only when these conditions are fulfilled, can it be said that the government of Israel has changed its policy from prioritizing the occupation to prioritizing peace, and only then will there be a chance for a political peace process to succeed.

IPS piece on linkage between Iran and Israel-Palestine

… is here, also here.
What I didn’t have room to explore there was the whole idea of positive linkage: that is, the idea that if the US can regularize its relationship with Iran to any significant degree then that might have considerable good effects on the Palestinian-Israeli, Syrian-Israeli, and Lebanon-Israeli peacemaking. It is not a trivial concept.

George Mitchell is doing what??

In this piece on the Israeli settlements issue in the NYT today, Isabel Kershner and Mark Landler report this:

Mr. Mitchell has been negotiating reciprocal measures with Israel’s Arab neighbors, in which they would take steps, like granting visas to Israeli citizens or allowing Israel to open trade offices in their capitals, in return for Israel’s action on settlements. But administration officials say the onus is on Israel to show progress.

Is this really true? They give no source for the claim.
I certainly hope it is not. There has always been a fear that Washington’s response to the Arab Peace Initiative might be to require the Arab states to make a substantial upfront deposit on the “normalization”-type steps they promise to give Israel in the wake of conclusion of the satisfactory Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
For them to be expected to make good on some of these promises simply in return for Israel stopping undertaking the illegal acts it has been carrying out for 42 years now defies belief.
Remember the history of Oslo…. As a direct result of Oslo Israel won normalization with around 32 countries around the world that had previously expressed their solidarity with the Palestinians by withholding full relations with Israel.
Israel won those enormous benefits, which opened significant new markets for its arms industry in many rich countries in East Asia, while the Palestinians won… nothing except incarceration in the ever-shrinking open-air prisons that the West Bank and Gaza soon after became.
Actually, there is some reason to wonder about the accuracy of the NYT writers’ claim about Mitchell’s position. After all, which of “Israel’s Arab neighbors” might they be referring to? Israel has five Arab neighbors. With two of them– Egypt and Jordan– Israel has full peace treaties, and Israeli citizens and business-people can get visas very easily. The other three are Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.
Israel itself prevents its citizens from visiting occupied Palestine (except in the context of doing army service there.)
So is Mitchell negotiating the kind of “reciprocal steps” Kershner and Landler write about with Syria and Lebanon? I highly doubt it.
The way the NYT writers and their editors refer to the settlements is also mealy-mouthed and misleading. They write:

Almost 300,000 Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, among a Palestinian population of some 2.5 million. Much of the world considers the 120 or so settlements a violation of international law.

Why not count the settlers in East Jerusalem, too?
I am certainly assuming and hoping that when Clinton and other administration officials talk about a settlement freeze they at least are talking about the settlements inside Jerusalem as well as elsewhere in the West Bank.
The whole settler-vs.-Palestinians question is at its most intense and tinderbox-ish inside Jerusalem… And Jerusalem is a city that all Arab and Muslim leaders care about, passionately.

Does Obama understand Israel’s war goal in Iran?

If Israel launches a military attack (= act of war) against Iran, what would the main goal of this attack be?
There is good reason to believe that the goal would be not the direct physical destruction/incapacitation of Iran’s nuclear programs but rather, to trigger an all-out US-Iran war in the course of which, Israel’s planners hope, the US would do the dirty work in Iran that it is unable to do itself.
This is a course of action of greatest consequence for Americans.
The best assessments available indicate that– under even the “best case” scenario, from Israel’s viewpoint– an Israeli strike force could not itself “destroy” Iran’s nuclear technology program anywhere near completely, and the Iranian program would be set back by at most a couple of years.
But meanwhile, Iran, subjected to this act of war, would almost certainly retaliate. The retaliation would, with equal predictability, include actions against Israel’s prime ally in the region, the United States. (And, as I have written here many times before, Iran would have considerable justification under international law for including US targets in its retaliation.)
Of course, US forces would in turn respond.
Thus, an Israeli strike against Iran would almost certainly trigger a direct, and of course massive, war between Iran and the US. The US could be expected to launch considerably heavier strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities and to try to inflict other substantial– perhaps even fatal?– damage on the Iranian government.
Iran could be expected to counter with attacks against US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, against the vulnerable supply lines that support those forces, and possibly– in the event that the collapse of the Teheran regime seems imminent– with actions designed to paralyze US resupply efforts and world oil markets by blocking chokepoints like the Straits of Hormuz.
Triggering this big US-Iran war, rather than the direct ‘destruction’ of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, would most likely be the actual, though never openly stated, main goal of an Israeli attack against Iran.
I have reason to believe that this analysis of the likely course of events and of Israel’s actual war goal in Iran were clearly understood in the Bush White House.
Bush quite rightly also concluded that an all-out US-Iran war would be disastrous for the US’s positions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire region. For that reason, he and his officials went to some lengths to rein Israel in from launching– or even preparing for– the triggering attack against Iran.
But to what extent is this evaluation of the strategic realities shared by the Obama White House?
As Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett made clear in the excellent op-ed they published in Sunday’s NYT, the present administration has done almost nothing to follow up in practice on the president’s campaign-era promises to reach out in a serious way to Iran.
Secretary of State Clinton has done very little to back away from her campaign-era promises to “obliterate” Iran, and has chosen as her principal Iran-affairs adviser Dennis Ross, a clear hawk on Iranian affairs.
The Mann-Leveretts noted that Obama has meanwhile kept in place a well-funded (and Bush-initiated) program that seeks to overthrow the Iranian regime. As they note, keeping that program in place sends a powerful message to Iran’s rulers that “American intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, ultimately, hostile.”
It also sends a powerful message to the Israeli government that their launching of a “triggering” military attack against Iran might actually be welcomed by all those in Washington– in the administration as well as in Congress– who continue to seek the overthrow of the Islamic republic by some variety of means.
Obama won the election last November; and before that he won the primary against Hillary Clinton. He won both races in good part because the American people supported his approach of making a sincere effort to de-escalate our country’s tensions with Iran, rather than the much more belligerent stances that both Clinton and McCain advocated towards Iran.
He won in good part because the American people are smart enough to see that a policy of belligerency, of hyping alleged threats, and blocking avenues for diplomatic de-escalation served our country very badly in Iraq– and can reliably be expected to be disastrous for our country if it is applied to Iran.
At this point, he needs to take actions through many different means to make sure that all parts of his administration are on the same page, giving clear backing to the stance of sincere diplomatic engagement with Iran that he outlined so eloquently and so correctly during the election campaign.
He needs to axe that destabilize-Iran program immediately.
And he needs to make absolutely clear to the Israeli government and its many remaining supporters in the US Congress, using a whole variety of both public and private means, that he judges that any Israeli military attack against Iran directly threatens our country’s interests, and that therefore he will do whatever it takes to ensure that Israel launches no such attack.
Americans should be quite clear: It is our forces and our interests, not Israel’s, that are on the front-line against Iran. We cannot continue to give Israel the extremely generous support it has had from Washington for the past 40-plus years if Israel takes a single action, at any level, that puts our country’s people at risk.
The Mann-Leveretts argue that “in all likelihood” it is already too late for Obama to correct his administrations policies toward Iran. I am not so pessimistic. But if he is to correct his stance that means taking action not only to correct Washington’s policies but also, equally importantly, to rein in an Israel that on this matter may have interests that are very different indeed than those of Americans.

Closing Gitmo: The Abe Lincoln solution

I understand the degree of difficulty that pres. Obama and many members of Congress feel they have in closing Gitmo. A proportion of the people incarcerated there– some for more than seven years now– are people against whom no credible evidence of wrongdoing has yet been found; but a proportion are people who, serious-minded US officials believe, are guilty of serious misdeeds in the past who could be reasonably expected to engage in serious anti-US misdeeds if released in the future.
Many members of Congress have now loudly gone on the record saying they don’t want these “terrorists” shoved into their back yard.
(We can also remember that the way they have been treated since their capture and incarceration may well have increased rather than mitigated their level of anti-Americanism.)
I have a solution, that we could call the Abe Lincoln solution.
The biggest point to remember is that the conundrum Obama faces regarding Guantanamo is not of his making. It is the responsibility of the Bush-Cheney team.
Back during the US civil war, as the war dead from both sides notched up to unprecedented levels, Pres. Lincoln decided to turn the extensive grounds of Robert E. Lee’s mansion in northern Virginia into a war cemetery. Because Lee was responsible for starting the civil war (correction: for prolonging the civil war ~HC), Lincoln felt it was only appropriate to bury a good portion of the war dead on Lee’s front lawn. That was the origin of the Arlington Cemetery.
My solution is therefore to find out where George W. Bush and Dick Cheney plan to spend the rest of their lives and build US Supermax prisons right in their back yards. Expropriate some of their own, no doubt extensive, lawns to do this, if possible. (Better still, build prison facilities that are far more humane than the present breed of Supermaxes.)
This is a policy headache, and a moral dilemma, that Bush and Cheney got our country into. We should never forget that– and never let them forget it, either.

IPS piece on Turkey’s role in region, world

… is here. Also here.
We’re on our way to Ankara, going via Bursa, which was the Ottomans’ capital for many years before, finally, they were able to figure out a way to dislodge the Byzantines from Istanbul, which happened some 40 years before the peoples of America were surprised by the arrival of that parvenu adventurer, Columbus.